The Tor Project Is launching the Tor Bug Bounty Program

The Tor officially announced to launch the Tor Bug Bounty Program in the next year, a great news for the Tor community.

The non-profit organization that is maintaining the TOR project plans to launch very soon a Tor Bug Bounty Programfor researchers who find vulnerabilities in the popular anonymizing platform.

This is a great for all the researchers that fights for online anonymity and that wants to contribute to improve the security offered by the Tor system.

The imminent launch of the Tor bug bounty program was announced during the annual talk (“State of the Onion”) by representatives of the Tor Project at the Chaos Communication Congress held in Hamburg, Germany.

The State of the Onion is arranged to cover technical, social, economic, political, and cultural issues pertaining to anonymity, the Tor Project, and the communities that use the system.

The Tor Bug Bounty Program will reward who report serious security vulnerabilities in the website or products managed by the Tor project.

The Tor Bug bounty project, like similar initiatives, aims to encourage hackers and security experts to responsibly report the loopholes affecting the Tor platform and that they discovered.

“We are grateful to the people who have looked at our code over the years, but the only way to continue to improve is to get more people involved…This program will encourage people to look at our code, find flaws in it, and help us to improve it.” Nick Mathewson, one of the founders of the Tor Project, told to Motherboard.

said about the bug bounty program as reported by Motherboard:

It is likely that the Tor bug bounty program will start in 2016. Clearly the bounty program can award researchers a lower fee respect that sum that could be offered by a government for a zero-day in a project considered strategic by intelligence agencies.

To give you an idea of the price of a zero-day, in November the zero-day trader Zerodium awarded $1 million for hacking the latest Apple iOS operating system, the same company offers Zwill pay $30,000 for an exploit that affects the Tor Browser.

Who pays the Tor bug bounty program?

“We have a sponsor, OTF [Open Technology Fund], who is paying HackerOne, a company that specializes in this, to help us do it,” explained Roger Dingledine, co-founder and research director of the Tor Project.

HackerOne used by experts that discover flaws in a software and desire to get in touch with the companies affected by them.

“The program will start out invite-only,” Mike Perry, lead developer of the Tor Browser, said during the talk, and added that vulnerabilities “specific to our applications” would fall into the program.

Recently a news monopolized the attention of the Tor community, security experts speculate that the FBI paid the researchers of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) $1 Million to help them to de-anonymize Tor users, but FBI denies it.